Cutting emissions to mitigate climate change will also make people healthier, according to research.
November 2009
Thomas Metzinger - The Ego Tunnel (Reviewed at Conscious Entities)
Conscious Entities offers a great two-part review of Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. I've been wanting to read this book since I first heard about it, and still do, despite the issues the review raises.
The Ego Tunnel (pt 1)
The denial of one’s own existence might seem a desperate philosophical strategy, but denying the reality of the self is a line which a number of people have taken, and Thomas Metzinger is prominent among them. The thesis of his massive 2003 work is summed up in the title: Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. In that book, Metzinger made a commendable effort to balance philosophy and science; but the sheer size of the resulting text may have deterred some readers – I confess to being somewhat daunted myself. Now he has come back with a slimmer volume The Ego Tunnel which is aimed at a wider public and raises wider issues which Metzinger suggests need public attention.
Metzinger’s theory – the Self-model Theory of Subjectivity or SMT - suggests that subjective experience is really a kind of trick the brain plays on itself. Our brain sets up a model of the world (actually based on fairly limited data) to which it then adds a model of us, ourselves. The coherence of the model and the fact that the processes supporting it are transparent – ie invisible to us – yield the vivid impression of a self in direct contact with reality, and that’s where subjectivity arises; although in fact the whole thing is simply an illusion.
Metzinger’s view of qualia is characteristically complex. He has a good argument against the existence of what he calls canonical qualia, qualia conceived as subjective universals. He points out that our ability to discriminate is far greater than our ability to recognise. So, if we are presented with examples of green 64 and green 66, we can readily tell the difference: but if at a later stage we are presented with one of the examples, we have no hope of telling which it is. So there is no single thing that consistently goes along with the experience of green 64.
Concluding that at any rate we need to distinguish between ‘qualia’ available to memory and qualia available to the faculty of recognition, Metzinger goes on to distinguish a series of possible conceptions of qualia, ending with ‘Metzinger qualia’ which are available attentionally but not cognitively. These are slippery customers for obvious reasons, impossible to report and broadly ineffable – but then that’s how qualia are generally assumed to be.
Even as a summary, the foregoing is a bare and radically, probably over- simplified view of the theory, however. Metzinger actually presents ten constraints which need to be satisfied for the occurrence of subjective experience: they are:
- Globality; as in ‘global workspace’; conscious items are always integrated into an overall world-model,
- Presentationality; present in the now , temporal immediacy,
- Convolved holism; objects of experience are made up of collections of other objects in a nested hierarchy,
- Dynamicity; the perceived world flows through constant changes,
- Perspectivalness; we experience the world from a point of view,
- Transparency; we cannot see the works – the neural processing which gives rise to our experience is excluded from conscious experience,
- Offline activation; subjective experience is not confined to the live inputs from our senses, a notable exception being dreams, where a whole non-existent world appears.
- Representation of intensities; besides distinguishing between qualia (whichever version we’re dealing with) we can distinguish their levels of intensity,
- Homogeneity; areas of pink, for example, are made up of smaller areas of pink, not red and white at once, and
- Adaptivity; the features of subjective experience have to be things that could reasonably have appeared in the course of evolution.
You may feel that there’s something a bit odd about this list, especially the appearance of ‘adaptivity’. One does not have to be a creationist to feel uneasy about the idea that that is really an essential feature of conscious experience in any deep sense. In a précis which he prepared for a discussion on the Psyche site – sadly this no longer appears to be available – Metzinger discussed only the first six constraints, which suggests that the last four are at least somewhat dispensable. This is a bit confusing – is homogeneity essential to conscious experience, or was that just a kind of bonus, a description of a property of phenomenal experience which is important but not a defining requirement? I think one issue here may be that Metzinger seems to want to do two jobs at once; he wants to explain subjectivity in a philosophical sense, but he also wants to describe and categorise phenomenal experience in a way which can be related to scientific observation, clarifying the puzzling phenomenology of blindsight and other unusual conditions. These are not incompatible aims, exactly, and there’s no absolute reason why one account couldn’t do both, but there is a tension. A robust philosophical explanation would pare down the account to its essentials, while the description of subjectivity seems to be something we would want to do as fully as possible.
Read the whole post.
And here is part two.
The Ego Tunnel (pt 2)
Among a number of interesting features, The Ego Tunnel includes a substantial account of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and similar phenomena. Experiments where the subjects are tricked into mistaking a plastic dummy for their real hand (all done with mirrors), or into feeling themselves to be situated somewhere behind their own head (you need a camera for this) show that our perception of our own body and our own location are generated within our brain and are susceptible to error and distortion; and according to Metzinger this shows that they are really no more than illusions (Is that right, by the way - or are they only illusions when they’re wrong or misleading? The fact that a camera can be made to generate false or misleading pictures doesn’t mean that all photographs are delusions, does it?).
There are many interesting details in this account, quite apart from its value as part of the overall argument. Metzinger briefly touches on four varieties of autoscopic (self-seeing) phenomena, all of which can be related to distinct areas of the brain: autoscopic hallucination, where the subject sees an image of themselves; the feeling of a presence, where the subject has the strong sense of someone there without seeing anyone; the particularly disturbing heautoscopy, where the subject sees another self and switches back and forth into and out of it, unsure which is ‘the real me’; and the better-known OBE. OBEs arise in various ways: often detachment from the body is sudden, but in other cases the second self may lift out gradually from the feet, or may exit the corporeal body via the top of the head. Metzinger tells us that he himself has experienced OBEs and made many efforts to have more (going so far as to persuade his anaesthetist to use ketamine on him in advance of an operation, with no result - I wonder whether the anaesthetist actually kept his word) ; speaking of lucid dreams, another personal interest, he tells the story of having one in which he dreamed an OBE. That seems an interesting bit of evidence: if you can dream a credible OBE, mightn’t they all be dreams? This seems to undercut the apparently strong sense of reality which typically accompanies them.
Interestingly, Metzinger reports that a conversation with Susan Blackmore helped him understand his own experiences. Blackmore is of course another emphatic denier of the reality of the self. I don’t in any way mean to offer an ad hominem argument here, but it is striking that these two people both seem to have had a particular interest in ’spooky’ dualistic phenomena which their rational scientific minds ultimately rejected, leading on to an especially robust rejection of the self. Perhaps people who lean towards dualism in their early years develop a particularly strong conception of the self, so that when they adopt monist materialism they reject the self altogether instead of seeking to redefine and accommodate it, as many of us would be inclined to do?
On that basis, you would expect Metzinger to be the hardest of hard determinists; his ideas seem to lean in that direction, but not decisively. He suggests that certain brain processes involved in preparing actions are brought up into the Ego Tunnel and hence seem to belong to us. They seem to be our own thoughts, our own goals and because the earlier stages remain outside the Tunnel, they seem to have come from nowhere, to be our own spontaneous creations. There are really no such things as goals in the world, any more than colours, but the delusion that they do exist is useful to us; the idea of being responsible for our own actions enables a kind of moral competition which is ultimately to our advantage (I’m not quite sure exactly how this works). But in this case Metzinger pulls his punch: perhaps this is not the full story, he says, and describes compatibilism as the most beautiful position.
Metzinger pours scorn on the idea that we must have freedom of the will because we feel our actions to be free, yet he does give an important place to the phenomenology of the issue, pointing out that it is more complex than might appear. The more you look at them, he suggests, the more evasive conscious intentions become. How curious it is then, that Metzinger, whose attention to phenomenology is outstandingly meticulous, should seem so sure that we have at all times a robust (albeit delusional) sense of our selves. I don’t find it so at all, and of course on this no less a person than David Hume is with me; with characteristically gentle but devastating scepticism, he famously remarked “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”
Metzinger concludes by considering a range of moral and social issues which he thinks we need to address as our understanding of the mind improves. In his view, for example, we ought not to try to generate artificial consciousness. As a conscious entity, the AI would be capable of suffering, and in Metzinger’s view the chances are its existence would be more painful than pleasant. One reason for thinking so is the constrained and curtailed existence it could expect; another is that we only have our own minds to go on and would be likely to produce inferior, messed-up versions of it. But more alarming, Metzinger argues that human life itself involves an overall preponderance of pain over pleasure; he invokes Schopenhauer and Buddha.
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Invisible Chair! Disappearing Designs & Hidden Structures
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At first it looks unbelievable – the heaviest and most solid part of a chair floating on nothing. Clear acrylic at the base of the legs fades slowly to wood-color paint toward the top of the structure, seat and back frame of this unique chair design.
Designed by Nendo, this is as much an artistic trick as it is a practical piece of home furniture. After all, while the initial experience is quite impressive the trick quickly becomes old hat – but their strategies and tactics persist in other works.
Nonetheless, other works from Nendo prove equally amazing and likewise use illusion for more complex-yet-subtle pieces of everyday furniture. This chair, for example, looks far too thin to be completely wood – and it is. Yet by using rounded wooden elements with no seams it seems, it becomes hard to guess that there is a hidden metal frame inside of the narrow wood structure.
Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Dornob Design:
Optical Illusion Furniture: Creepy Shadow Chair Design
This has to be prefaced: clearly, the illusion of this shadow chair is quickly shattered upon careful viewing and someone might not be fooled as easily in the first place as this image might lead you to believe. Nonetheless, even without the illusion, this is an offbeat chair design to reckoned with – particularly since it, unlike many concept designs, is actually in production and can be p...
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The Third Poise of the Supermind Provides Reality to the Individual Manifestations
The third poise of the Supermind would reverse the focus such that the Unity is put behind and the play of force through the individual form or manifestation becomes the primary focus. While the unity is never entirely lost, it is clearly in the background and the separation or dualism is the key component that allows the play of the multiplicity to begin and continue.
While the individual forms of the Divine would still be aware of the Oneness, they would be focused and absorbed in the play of the Multiplicity.
The three standpoints or poises of Supermind are not truly separate and independent from one another, but are aspects that allow the all-comprehending power of the Supermind to both be founded in the Unity while supporting and creating the manifested worlds and beings for the play of forces, forms and consciousness. There is a reality to the Multiplicity just as there is a reality to the Unity. One cannot be determined “real” and the other “unreal”. While human mentality easily gets fixated on one term or another of these three poises, and thereby erects a philosophy or religious standpoint based on whichever term it favors at a particular time, in fact, there can be no ultimate separation, divisoin or opposition between these three poises.
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 16, The Triple Status of Supermind
Waterpleinen: Recreating Rain Reserviors as Dynamic Public Parks
For cities that are settled below sea level, dealing with copious amounts of rainfall year round can be a destructive challenge. But as the
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Large Hadron Collider Sets New World Record
CERN announced early Monday morning that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV held by Fermilab’s Tevatron.
The LHC has had a rough beginning, suffering a mechanical failure just a week after it started up for the first time in September 2008. Now, 10 days after it turned on again, scientists are celebrating with their fingers crossed that the machine is safely on its way to the physics experiments they plan to start next year when the LHC has reached its target energy of 7 TeV.
“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer in a press release Monday. “However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”
The first beam was injected on November 20, and two beams sped around the 17-mile ring in opposite directions three days later. All four of the LHC’s detectors recorded data from the collision of those two beams.
The first to announce the record may have been the scientists running the CMS detector through their Twitter feed:
@CMSexperiment: World Record!! Tonight at about 22:00 the LHC accelerated a beam of protons to 1180 GeV - a new record energy!
Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.
Image: CERN
See Also:
- Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak
- Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
- Top 8 Large Hadron Collider Videos
- High-Energy Particle Physics Demystified
- An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider
Mini Microbe Portraits From the Micropolitan Museum
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Tired of the portraits, landscapes and abstract art that peppers the walls of most art museums? According to Dutch photographer Wim von Egmond, there’s one art subject that has been ignored for centuries and finally deserves its due: microscopic organisms.
As the head of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre, von Egmond has created the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, an online gallery of all creatures tiny and tinier. To gather his collection, von Egmond sampled organisms from anywhere he could find water, scooping up critters from urban puddles and country ditches as well as the ocean. From desmids to diatoms, he captured all the stunning features of these normally invisible creatures using a standard light microscope. Here, we’ve chosen a few of our favorite itty-bitties for your viewing pleasure.
The medusa Obelia
This odd-looking creature is a hydrazoan, a tiny relative of the jellyfish measuring just 1 millimeter wide. Like most jellyfish, the Obelia has two life stages, a free-swimming phase called the medusa stage (above) and a stationary phase called the polyp stage (below). During the medusa stage, the creature feeds from the yellow, star-shaped mouth at the center of its body and reproduces sexually using the four gonads surrounding its mouth. Eggs produced during the medusa phase will develop into larvae and then attach themselves to a surface, eventually turning into the stationary broom-shaped polyps pictured below.
Photos: Wim von Egmond/micropolitan.org
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